Oh, it's been a little while guys we're back with the xj and, as you might notice, we're missing a roof rack and we can't have that so come check out what we got over here. Casey was kind enough to send us eight of their daylighter headlights. We got the black housings and we got four spots and four spreads, so these things are going to light this thing up like a christmas tree, all right. So as joe mentioned earlier, we've kind of spent a lot of time figuring this.

We have different ideas, but one central feature to this roof: rack that i think is going to make it really cool. Is we're going to have a clam shell front that the light is going to sit in and basically what that's going to do? Is it's going to bring us right over the top of the windshield, so we'll do a nice little bend to bring it just barely over the windshield you'll probably be able to see it through the glass, but i think that's going to give us a really cool Effect and special shout out to josh and steve because they sent us a ton of measurements. For this thing, they really got us hooked up for basically just getting started and they came up with the idea of going over the windshield and we love it. We went ahead and bought these jcr roof rack mounts for any car that uses gutters.

So if you're doing your gutter mounted rack it just clamps around like that, and you just get a bolt and washer on there and that's what our pipes are here welcome. So we got all our roof rack mounts in and before we can even think about bending this stuff, we have to do a little bit of math um. So when you put the pipe in the bender, the like trailing edge will gain material and the like front piece will lose material. So you just have to make sure that everything lines up and it's going to end how you want.

If you want a piece that fits perfectly, we got these one inch, diameter 065 tubing and we're going to bend up our bottom hoop right now. So we finished that up. It's exactly 50.! So now we're doing our back section for the rear area. These ones are basically going to have a little bit shorter overhangs and we're going to bend it up a little square section, but this isn't how long it's going to be.

We just wanted to show you how our 90 degree sections are done. They're both 50 inches apart center to center. So that's awesome! So now, what we're going to do is we're going to hold up our front bar and do our little down part that's going to go right over the windshield, we're thinking it's going to use about a 30 degree angle. We don't know yet.

Let's try it out. All right so we're doing 30 degrees just to check this out. The good thing is that this stuff's pretty thin, so we can bend it back by hand if we don't like this angle, but we're just going to mock it up we're just kind of figuring things out right now, alrighty, i hope you all are liking. How this looks we are really digging it um, our lights, going to fit in there real nice.

Hopefully we can fit six of them in there, but now we need to do is work on our back section. So now that we have the front section and the rear hoops all done, all we need to do is just make a straight runner pipe that goes in between and then we'll be able to weld up the whole bottom section. Okay, so we cut two of these to 57 inches. Now you can kind of see it all coming together.

This is going to fit in right in like so now we'll do this a little classic angle, iron trick with the pipe in the corner and clamp it down. So it's all straight and then we'll have kind of our frame. This is kind of a challenge to fit all six lights, but what we ended up doing is taking this one inch piece of angle, iron welding it across and then doing the math to figure out the placement and drilling our holes. So now that that's all over with let's mount these lights, i'm running these apollos for a while, but these are gon na come off and be replaced with daylighters too it'll be super easy because all the kc plugs are the same.

The lights are in and they look amazing so now it's time to bend up the top part of our clamshell, so we just need to get the bender get our pipe and get the bending. We have our little section here for the front of the clam shell and we added this little square. That's clamped to the bottom. So now what we need to do is basically just kind of mock it up draw a line: go through our road fabric, tubing notcher notch this thing up and get it welded in we're at the rogue fab.

We got it all set up so make it super easy to get identical angles. That's pretty good! We got our top hoop tacked in right now. The rogue fab did an amazing job of getting these notches perfect and, more importantly, we can get the lights out and they're not trapped in there forever. So now we need to get it welded fully and then it's on to mounting it on the car.

So we got this thing welded up and we're using these c-clamps to hold our jcr roof rack mounts into position. While we measure this to make sure our heights are good, it is sweet, though people real mean looking. So our design calls her some wire mesh as a base, so we notch up these cross bars that slide in perfectly thanks to that rogue fab, tubing, notcher and then we'll be able to lay our mesh on top of this and weld it down cut our expanded Steel, we have all of these support bars welded in so now. I need to just weld in every single little joint where it touches the metal it's going to take forever, probably like 200 tacks or something so, let's get to welding all right.

We are done. That was a lot of welding. I feel like i was at a football game wearing a mascot helmet for like four hours, but we're done this looks awesome. All we need to do is our sidebar, so we're gon na keep it kind of simple and we're gon na do is we're gon na match this 35 degree bend up here and just have a straight bar coming down.

It'll come down at that same angle. In the back, so let's get to bending looks good all right. So now, what we're doing is we are making the ladder for the side of it just kind of a way to go up the roll cage um. We didn't really think of having one at the beginning, but we decided it's going to look cool and we've always kind of wanted one on the xj.

That way we can get our stuff on the top. So because this is a build breaker feet build. We got some go power, supports parts we're using their one inch, locking collars, and essentially we want the ladder to be removable. So we have it right up in here where it clamps onto the roll cage and then now from here down, we can start building our ladder all right, so we have the top and bottom of our ladder top's going to get clamped right up here, like so, And then the bottom is going to be this piece of angle iron that we're going to basically just use self-tapping screws to hold on to this metal piece of joe's rear bumper.

So now what the plan is, we want it to be tight and we kind of wanted to follow this body line right here as well as it's kind of hard to see, but the body comes up flat this way and then contours in so what we're going To do is with one bend. We want to accommodate both for this bend in as well as this bend this way that goes towards the front of the jeep. So the idea is we'll come up with two bars and an angle like this and an angle back up, so it's gon na be tough. This is kind of our first compound bend thing, but i think we can make something happen, so this is all tacked up.

Now we need to pull her off and weld up every little joint here so now that all the metal works done, we need to paint this thing, but we didn't have a paint boost, so we're about to run come on. Let's go. Take a look inside come on in, we got our harbor freight tent that we set up and then we put down a canvas drop cloth and in the back we have our two walmart box fans with two filters. One intake one exhaust and we made this box.

So we can slot everything in and the middle functions as our spray paint store, so pretty cool. This thing works really well now, let's paint this roof rack. We want this thing to be super durable. So what we're going to do is do a coat of primer.

Then we're going to coat it with tractor paint and then we're going to do some coats of bed liner, so it should be almost or just as strong as powder coat picked up all the painting. We didn't really film it that much, but it was kind of boring, but it's all bedlined and the finish is actually really nice kind of like script, and this stuff should be bulletproof, because we did so many coats of primer tractor paint and bed liner. It's getting a little too dark out for filming so cut to it on the jeep. Now, oh, that's before lockers right, all right guys, so we've been off-roading with the roof rack for a while now and it's holding up really well, it hasn't moved or anything, and it's super sturdy.

You can move the whole car with it. So overall super happy with how it turned out the kind of baja vintage design with the kc daylighters looks killer on this jeep and it's just a really unique roof rack, especially with the latter. So we're super happy with it and thank you for watching make sure to subscribe and check out our other jeep content and we'll see you next time good job. You.